A Little on "Doctor Sax"

So what is Doctor Sax?

It’s a book by Jack Kerouac, about himself at age eleven or thereabouts; about him and his family and his boyhood friends; and the flood that ruined his father’s printing business; and his boyhood fantasy world of good and evil.  It is quite different from Picano’s book about himself at the same age.

Kerouac wrote it while visiting William Burroughs in Mexico City in the early 1950s.  He allegedly wrote much of it while locked in the bathroom smoking marijuana.  He was influenced by the indigenous Mexican mythology he was learning about from Burroughs.

The background is Kerouac’s French-Canadian Catholic Massachusetts childhood.  In his outer life, Kerouac plays with his street friends and comes home to his parents and his sister.  But in his inner life, he envisions a world of demons, angels, and guardians.

The mythology is this:  Satan, in the form of a gigantic snake, was hurled into the center of the earth following The Fall.  Since then the snake has been burrowing upwards towards the surface. Now (roughly 1933) he is threatening to break through the earth’s surface at the site of an old castle-like building in Kerouac’s hometown, Lowell Massachusetts.  In anticipation of this, a huge “convention of world evil” is being held in the castle, attended by demons, vampires, and other evil creatures.  A heretical sect, the Dovists, claim that the Snake is an illusion—“merely a husk of doves.”  On the Last Day, the Dovists believe the doves will bring tidings of peace to the world.

Meanwhile a saint named Doctor Sax has spent generations seeking the potion that will destroy the snake.  On the day of the flood, he takes young Kerouac (called Dulouz in the book) under his care as he goes to destroy the snake.  Unfortunately, the powders and potions that Doctor Sax has spent generations perfecting have absolutely no effect on the snake.  All seems lost.  The universe doesn’t seem to care.  Evil seems triumphant.

Then a gigantic bird appears in the sky, accompanied by battalions of doves.  The bird grabs the snake and disappears with it into the sky.  Doctor Sax is amazed:  “The Universe disposes of its own evil!”  It is Easter morning.

It’s a strange book.  Then again, Eleven-year-old boys (and girls too, I’d wager) dream strange dreams.  Doctor Sax is an entirely different approach to novels about pre-adolescence.

Neither Doctor Sax, nor Picano’s Ambidextrous are your “ordinary” stories of coming of age.